Indonesia dug up roughly half as much nickel ore and collected twice the revenue, and that ratio is the entire argument for valuation

The Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources published its minerals and coal revenue position on 10 September 2026, and the nickel line in it is the most instructive number Indonesian resource policy has produced this year.

Non-tax state revenue from nickel reached Rp21 trillion in the eight months to 31 August 2026. Over the same period in 2025 it was Rp10 trillion. That is an increase of about 110 percent.

Over the same stretch, nickel ore production fell. Output stood at 173.79 million tonnes to 1 September 2026, against 320.37 million tonnes across 2025, a decline of roughly 46 percent.

Indonesia moved a great deal less rock and collected a great deal more money for it.

What the rest of the ledger shows

The nickel figure sits inside a broader picture that moves in the same direction. Total non-tax revenue from minerals and coal reached Rp108 trillion to 31 August 2026, against Rp87 trillion in the same period of 2025, an increase of Rp21 trillion. Coal contributed Rp66 trillion, up from Rp59 trillion.

Tri Winarno, Director General of Minerals and Coal, drew the conclusion plainly. With good management, and without pushing production excessively, the result works out positively for the country and for everyone in it.

That is a restrained way of describing a substantial shift in posture. For most of the past decade the working assumption in Indonesian resource policy, as in most resource economies, was that revenue tracks volume. These figures say otherwise, at least for this year and this commodity.

Where the extra value came from

Three things are doing the work here, and they are worth separating because they have different durability.

The first is price. Nickel prices recovered over the period, and part of the revenue increase is simply the same royalty percentage applied to a higher reference figure. Price is the least durable of the three contributors, because it can reverse.

The second is the royalty structure itself. Government Regulation No. 19 of 2025 reset production levy rates across minerals and coal, and the 2026 revenue targets were built on that reset. A tariff change of that kind raises the state's take per tonne independent of how many tonnes move.

The third, and the most durable, is what the ore is being turned into. The export ban on raw nickel ore has been in force since 2020, which means domestic production now flows into domestic processing rather than into ships. High pressure acid leach capacity at Obi converts limonite into battery raw material. Battery cell manufacture has been established at Karawang. Integrated battery ecosystem work continues across state and private partners. Each step lengthens the chain over which Indonesian value is captured, and each step means a tonne of ore supports more taxable activity inside the country than it did when it was exported as ore.

A resource economy that raises revenue while lowering extraction has found something more valuable than another tonne of ore. It has found a better estimate of what the tonne was worth in the first place.

The measurement Indonesia has built this year

This result did not arrive by accident, and it belongs alongside the rest of what the government has assembled during 2026.

Benchmark price formulas for nickel and bauxite were rewritten to account for accompanying minerals such as iron, cobalt, and chromium rather than nickel content alone, with the unit of account shifted from dry to wet metric tonne. Production quotas were tightened through the RKAB process and allocated with explicit reference to royalty contribution. Export oversight was centralised through PT Danantara Sumberdaya Indonesia, joining SIMBARA, the national single window, and customs data, with under invoicing and transfer pricing named as targets. A national mineral and strategic commodities exchange is due to begin operating on 1 January 2027 to establish an Indonesia Reference Price. Enforcement has demonstrated it can calculate and recover a precise loss, as the Rp401.65 billion returned in the PT CNI grade documentation case showed.

Every one of those instruments improves the accuracy of a number. Taken together they are a national programme to measure resource value properly, and the nickel revenue figure is the first clear evidence that the programme pays.

Sirkularium's view

This is a genuine policy achievement and it should be described as one. Holding production down while revenue rises is the harder path, it requires resisting the volume reflex, and the Ministry has held the line through a year of pressure to relax quotas. For government and public institutions, three observations follow.

First, the ratio itself deserves to become a published indicator. Revenue per tonne of ore, tracked by commodity and reported each quarter alongside the existing production and PNBP figures, would turn this year's encouraging outcome into a managed variable. It would also make clear how much of any future improvement comes from price, from tariff, and from value added domestically, which matters because only the third is fully within Indonesia's control.

Second, the same reasoning extends naturally to depletion. If a tonne of ore now returns more to the state, then the land, water, and ecosystem cost of producing that tonne becomes a larger question rather than a smaller one, because the country is choosing to extract less and should want to know precisely what each remaining tonne costs. Indonesia already has the methodology. Permen LH No. 7 Tahun 2014 prices ecological damage, environmental economic loss, and recovery cost. Permen LH No. 15 Tahun 2012 values forest ecosystems, and the Morowali work has shown it produces auditable figures when applied with GIS. What is missing is the cadence.

Third, the natural pairing is obvious and inexpensive. Publish revenue per tonne and environmental condition per tonne together. Indonesia would then be the first resource economy in the region able to state, in one table, what a tonne of its ore earns and what it costs the landscape that held it.

For operators, the practical implication is that the terms of competition have moved. When the state collects more per tonne and allocates quota by contribution, the companies that do best are those that can demonstrate value per tonne across every dimension the state measures. Environmental position is the dimension where measurement is thinnest and where a company that already holds a rigorous, independently verified valuation of its land, water, and ecosystem condition will be furthest ahead of the requirement.

What to watch next is whether revenue per tonne is published as a series, whether the 2026 full year figures hold the pattern once prices are stripped out, and whether the environmental column begins to be reported with the same regularity as the revenue column now is.